ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

3 Million Files on CD.TEXTFILES.COM —

Yes, that’s right, it’s official:
cd3mil

After hitting the one million file mark in December of 2005 and passing the two million mark a few years later, we’re now at over 3,000,000 files on cd.textfiles.com, my shareware and shovelware collection. I’ve ranted about this thing consistently for years – it’s one of my favorite projects. For the most recent injection, I had a collection of 20 CD-ROMs I bought off of e-bay ($10 plus shipping) and of those, 14 were not previously on the site. I also had a couple .RAR collections people had sent me, and between it all, I suddenly found myself adding another 10 gigabytes of material.

A while ago I added an undocumented feature. (It’s still waiting to be prettied up.) If you go to this page you can get a list, newest to oldest, of all the CD directories on the site.

As you can also see, it’s 293 gigabytes of delight, making it by far the largest of the TEXTFILES.COM properties.

So many times I use this thing, almost daily. It’s my own personal online library of BBS and computer history. It solves disputes, it finds old textfiles, it truly is a swiss army knife of history. And judging by the marauding bands of downloaders, it’s also a pretty popular site for others. I think a torrent is in order… don’t you?

One of the projects on the burner is to once and for all ISO all the Shareware CDs in my collection and put them online, scanned booklets and all. We’ll see how that goes. Until then, enjoy the avalanche!


Categorised as: computer history | textfiles.com

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6 Comments

  1. Just a heads up: I have 14 more CDs I’ll be sending you soon. Such fun.

  2. Danny D. says:

    Wow, almost 300 gigabytes? That’s amazing!

    And yes, a torrent would be delicious (but huge).

  3. Gene Buckle says:

    Jason, do you think you could find time to add a “date added” column to the CD listing (directory.html)?

    Maybe a “NEW!” icon for the new ones as well? 🙂

    tnx!

    g.

  4. Benj Edwards says:

    This is awesome. I’ll be sending you some CDs too if I can ever find them. It may require an epic item-flip of my entire house and garage.

  5. J says:

    Any news on this? A Torrent would be much appreciated!

  6. Sophie says:

    I would also *love* a torrent! It’s really difficult to use these CDs properly without having all the files, and I’m not about to download the whole CD because ouch, the transfer costs for you would be huge.

    So yes, please count this as a vote for torrent files! I would suggest one torrent per CD, with an extra torrent for people who want the whole collection.